The Way Out Is In / Slow Down, Rest, and Heal: The Spirit of the Rains Retreat (Episode #7)

00:00:18

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Way Out Is In podcast, I’m Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems change.

00:00:30

And I am Brother Phap Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village community.

00:00:45

The way out is in.

00:00:59

Hello and welcome back. So we’re recording all of our episodes from the small hut of Thich Nhat Hanh, which is called Sitting Still Hut. So we feel very much as we record these sessions, Phap Huu, don’t we? That Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is very present.

00:01:20

He is. And we definitely feel the energy, the energy of stillness. When we sit in this hut it really invites us to just calm down and just to be aware of what is happening around us, who is in front of us, and also just to connect to ourself.

00:01:37

Yeah, and we’re sitting around Thay’s kitchen table and we’re with our colleague Cata, who does all recording and all the help. So, Cata, thank you for always being here, being so wonderful. Today we are going to be talking about what’s known as the Rains Retreat, which is a 3-month retreat that happens every year in Plum Village. And also as part of that, all the monastics and all the lay practitioners are asked to focus on what we call an aspiration, what it is, their focus, what is that over the three months of the retreat that people would like to focus on and to build their practice around. So Brother Phap Huu, you know all about the Rains Retreat. You’ve probably done, probably 20 of them or more. So tell us a little bit what is the Rains Retreat?

00:02:33

The Rains Retreat is a beautiful tradition. It comes from the time of the Buddha and his original Sangha, his monks and nuns. And it began when his community started to grow and the community at the early days of the Buddha’s career, they didn’t yet have big monasteries, but they would travel around villages to villages in order to spread the Dharma. It’s part of the aspiration of a monastic is to practice, to learn the Dharma directly from the Buddha or directly from other senior monks and nuns, but then continue to have a chance to be in touch with villagers. So they would go each day before noon to go for alms round, to beg for food. And it’s a very beautiful tradition. And in many countries such as Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the monks in the Theravada tradition, they still keep this practice alive. And you would go to each house, no discrimination. And you were standing in front of the house and stand there for a few minutes in silence. And if the home owner has some food to offer, they will come out and they will offer their food in your arms bowl, which is a begging bowl. And after you have received that, you will spend some time to share the Dharma, or if the laypeople have a question they have a chance to ask, then the monks would have a chance to share their experience through the teachings of the Buddha. Or if somebody in the family has passed away or they feel like they need a blessing, they would ask the monks or the nuns to chant. So this kind of tradition was also a door, a passage so that the monastic continues to keep a relationship with the world, with society, so that even though we devote ourselves to monastic hood and to our practice of transformation for ourselves and our growth spiritually, but it’s still very important to be connected to everyone in the world. And so each day the monastics would do this and they would travel from village to village. And in the evening they would sleep in the forest under a trunk of a tree or whatever conditions that is around. But when the community started to grow in larger number and they had to grow in bigger groups, especially during the rainy season, the downpour of the rain was heavy and made traveling much more difficult. And monks and nuns can become easily ill because of the weather. And they also started to notice that when the rain started to really fall down heavily, all of the insects, the frogs, the fishes, everything from the from the paddies, from the rice paddies, they would manifest. So then they realized by walking through these fields, because back in the day, they didn’t have, like, all of these roads like we do today. Suddenly they realized they would be stepping on a lot of living beings, so it was also a chance of the practice of compassion to not crush these living beings. So the Buddha decided that for three months during the rainy season, the monastic community would all gather at a selected place. And later on, monasteries were developed and built thanks to the lay practitioners who became lay disciples of the Buddha and the community. They would help create these monasteries for the monks and nuns so they would all gather and spend time together and they wouldn’t have to travel so far and so much. And they wouldn’t have to destroy rice paddies or step on living beings just because of the conditions of nature. So that was the origin of the tradition. But what it also allowed for the monastics and for the Buddha was a chance to deepen the practice. So the Buddha would then had the chance to stay within a boundary, a location for three whole months. That allowed the Buddha to offer many deep teachings, a continuous teaching. And it allowed younger monks to take refuge in more senior monastics, to be trained and to be guided and just to be around a presence to take in their their spiritual energy, their peace and their stillness. And this tradition has continued through all of the Buddhist monastic communities. And in Plum Village, we still maintain it. And it is a retreat that our teacher emphasizes a lot on deepening our practice and deepening our studies, as well as just to learn to be still. And originally, it is in principle just for the monastic community, but our teacher has opened the Rains Retreat from even before I came, all lay friends were always welcome. But in our community, our teacher would also have a chance to go deeper into his teachings and translating new sutras. Thay would have a chance to share them through his dharma talks and we all have a chance to learn together with the teacher and the students.

00:08:30

Yeah. So my wife and I have come for the last, before we moved next door to Plum Village, we came every year for 14 years during this time. And I think the reason we came was, was exactly what you’re saying. It’s also like the season. It’s sort of heading towards autumn, winter, and it’s about when nature starts to slow down. And it was always our experience that that it was lovely to come here during this quiet, reflective period where the energy, in a sense, was coming back to the center. And, you know, seeing how busy the monastics are, as you say, you go to retreats all over the world. And this is a chance, as you say, to deepen your practice. And also interesting that it’s a tradition that’s been going for 2600 years but is still very, very relevant.

00:09:25

Exactly. And I also just wanted to share that this tradition is also alive in every practice centers and monasteries. And in today’s time, I think every monastery would have to adapt to what season is most adaptable for their community. And in some countries like South East Asia, I think there are three months institute is in the summer. And for us, at one stage it was in the winter, but then we moved it to the autumn. Yeah.

00:10:00

So at the opening ceremony, Brother Phap Huu, as the abbot of the Upper Hamlet monastery of the monks, you sort of read out a sort of a wish for the community and about, you know, what this Rains Retreat could be, but also about your own personal aspiration. And as I was saying a bit earlier, I think one of the wonderful things about the Rains Retreat is saying, well, if you’ve got three months rather than fritter away, even if you’re being contemplative, if you don’t have a sense of direction of where you want to do, where you want to go, then the time can easily run, run away, even if you’re going slowly without accomplishing much. But this idea of having an aspiration, a focus saying actually, what is it? What is most in my heart at the moment? Where do I feel I most need to go? Where can I deepen my practice? It’s a chance to really deepen in a particular direction. So I’m just wondering whether you read out a sort of, in a sense, your message to the community. And it would be lovely, actually, if you could just read it out and then we can maybe discuss your own personal aspiration.

00:11:14

I would love to. But before that, I wanted to share about the ceremony on the first day of the Rains Retreat, because this is how this message becomes alive. So the image of the Rains Retreat I like to see and I picture in my mind is like we’re all birds in this forest. And throughout the year we’ve been flying to different countries to offer retreats or in our time of the pandemic we’ve also been flying through the Internet, through all of these online platforms, all of these interviews, as well as consultations in a way that’s also a way of being out and offering. And in the pandemic, we have been quite active and very positively active in order to bring the Dharma to our friends who have the aspiration to find a spiritual dimension in their life. And the Rains Retreat is this opportunity, this calling all the birds to come home and to return to the forests and reside and be still. And we have the first day, the opening day of the ceremony of the Rains Retreat we have the ceremony. It’s very beautiful. We all come together. We all wear our yellow, orange sanghati which is traditional robe that comes from the Buddha’s time that we all are transmitted once we become a monastic. And we gather and we sit together and there are drums, there are bells to welcome the opening of the Rains Retreat, which is incense offering. And then we have this practice of taking refuge. And this is very important because this is the tradition from the Buddha’s time also. So everyone in our community, we have mentors or mentees, someone we look after. And it’s a chance to really also develop sangha building, sangha harmony. We want to live together in harmony. And to do that, we have to learn to be to to be open, to take refuge in one another. And this is a real practice and it’s a practice for us who have been long in the sangha to open up and learn to be an elder brother, learn to be a refuge, learn to be open, learn to offer. And for young ones to learn, to also be vulnerable, to open, to share their difficulty, for us to understand and to support. And so there is this aspect of taking refuge. So in the ceremony, we all would come together to express our intention to practice together in harmony and because our community is so big, so we ask the representatives of the hamlets to have this opening speech to share the aspiration from their monastery. So I would represent the brothers community and before before writing it down and before speaking it out on the day, I would take at least three or four days just contemplating it, just cooking it like and just asking myself, what is it really that has happened for us in the last year, for the community and then for the world. And then what is it that we need and what is it that we continue that we want to aspire? So this is what I wrote.

00:14:39

Brother, just before you read it out, just one small fact that our listeners won’t be aware of is that the color background of The Way Out Is In which you all see illustrated, it’s actually the color of your sanghati robes. So we actually took a picture of your robe. So that yellow background to the branding of this podcast series is your gown.

00:15:06

That is correct. So, dear friends, this is my aspiration. How fortunate we are to have the conditions to be together and practice for three, four months. The Rains Retreat carries the spirit of being still, not running away, either from our suffering or chasing after an idea of happiness is an opportunity of returning home to oneself, to take refuge in our spiritual family, to enrich and deepen our dharma body with our mindfulness practice, and to continue our teacher’s legacy in our sangha body. This is a beautiful tradition the Buddha has created for us to rest and heal. What is left is for us to continue to learn to open our hearts and our minds. The pandemic continues to be a challenge for many globally. It asks us to continue to practice with impermanence, learning to adapt, to let go and to accept reality. We know the Earth still needs a lot of care and healing. May our practice contribute to the well-being of our planet. This Rains Retreat, I really want to practice to slow down. I asked my brothers and sisters to support me so I don’t lose myself. Please, dear teacher, elder brothers and sisters, be a refuge for me and for the whole community.

00:17:00

Wow. Thank you. Brother, before you talk about your aspiration of wanting to slow down, so we’ll come to that in a minute. But you talked about being still, and one of the things that I feel about sort of modern civilization is that we’ve completely lost our connection to the seasons that, you know, when autumn comes and into winter, you know, nature knows when to be fulsome, when to come into its sort of its true manifestation and then to start letting go and the leaves to fall and then to be still in the winter and to sort of, in a sense, for the energy to come back in. So can you talk a little bit about what you mean by stillness? Because it’s like most people are living their lives as there’s no season, that they’re busy every day of the year, that there’s no period where it’s a chance to sort of just slow down. And yet you have three months, a three month period every year where the purpose is to do just that. Talk about what it is to be still.

00:18:13

I see in my practice, stillness is an ingredient for peace. I definitely see when peace can manifest is when there is stillness inside of me. And just like you have shared, like it’s so easy to be busy nowadays and it’s so easy to be stimulated through the devices, through noise, through activities. And if we are not skillful, we will get caught in this cycle of busyness and even for us monastics, because we are a part of the world, so all of this noise from outside also finds a way into the monastery. And the practice of stillness it also helps us to look deeply. The image that we have in one of our songs, Breathing in, breathing out, I am blooming like a flower, Solid as a mountain, Fresh as I do and water reflecting. Right? So it gives this image of a lake. When the lake becomes still, it has a chance to be a mirror for it to reflect reality. What is happening in the here and now for it to really manifest? And we see that there is a lot that we want to manage and to take care of inside of ourselves, especially if we want to start to understand ourselves more. We also have to allow ourselves to be still more in order to really see what manifests for us, because when we are still our internal aspirations and voices and perceptions have a chance to really reveal itself, and we have clarity to look at it with an eye of a practitioner, of someone who looks at it as an observer, to take care of it. And if we are always busy and I’ve been busy through the year and I was like, oh yeah, I need to do that. But it becomes a procrastination, it becomes a dream, it becomes a wish, and then you’re going to keep holding it off because you’re never still or you never really allow yourself to really do it. So this stillness that we cultivate is not only for our aspiration or our internal stories and our internal reflection, but stillness is also very important in today where we need rest, we need healing. We are so busy. We are not aware of our body. We’re not aware of our posture. We’re not aware where there is stiffness, where there’s stress. So learning to be still is an art to heal. And this is very important. This is one of also the core teachings in the Plum Village tradition where we have total relaxation

00:21:18

And also Thich Nhat Hanh has one of his calligraphy, it says ‘stop, rest and heal’. And he gives the example of an animal which is injured, that it goes and finds a quiet spot maybe in the forest or wherever its habitat is, where it feels safe. And it just stops and it allows the natural processes of life to show up. And sometimes I think in modern Western society, we don’t trust in natural processes. We always think we need to intervene in some way. But actually, sometimes just the art of stopping, resting creates the healing. And it’s funny, brother, you were talking… It’s just a very small example came to my mind, which was when I was at The Guardian, I was very, very busy all the time. And I remember I went to a meeting and I was supposed to go back to the office to collect my computer, my phone, to take my long train journey home. And that evening the meeting went on late and I went straight home. So I was sitting on the train. No computer, no phone, no book, no bag, just me. And I had one of the best creative ideas I had in years, which manifested into a whole new section of The Guardian at that time. And if I’d had my phone, if I’d had my computer, if I’d had a book, I would have filled that time. But because I couldn’t fill it with anything, I just had to stop. And actually, what I realized in that moment is that when we stop, we allow more than just our mind to take place. It’s like it’s like, you know, some people call it grace, some people call it… well, I mean, there are all sorts of names, but there is that sense of. You know, when, for instance, some great inventions happen in more than one place, at the same time, it’s almost as though there’s always stuff in the energetic field that we can almost reach our hand into. But if we are constantly busy, we don’t allow for that sort of channel of grace, that openness to life to actually show up.

00:23:34

Exactly. And stopping is actually one of the wings of meditation. So actually, to practice meditation, we have to have the ability to stop and to rest. And Thay, our teacher, is very modern. So he at one time during one of our Rains Retreat, he shared with us that already in the spirit of the Rains Retreat we have a boundary that we stay within for three months and we only go out of our boundaries only when we need to. For example, our shoppers of the community, we have to go shopping or we have to go fix our car. And it’s a very direct purpose. And we don’t go and we let our mind and our habit take over. Like you’re driving, and then you see a boulangerie, you’re like, oh, let’s stop and get a croissant or a baguette. No, that’s not the spirit. So in the Rains Retreat when you ask permission to leave the boundaries, you go directly to the the task and you had to come back right away. That’s also a spirit of it. And that’s also…

00:24:45

Dear friends, you just listen to some nuts falling from our trees. We’re just closing the door. And so there is this… these rules that we set up in the monastery to help everyone to be still. But then when you, Thay said also we don’t allow ourselves to go out with our minds too much meaning spending too much time on the computer, on the internet or listening to news or listening to music. So all of these other forms that we can’t allow ourselves to escape from the present moment is still present. And there is a commitment, there’s a real commitment that we have to make or else our habits will take over.

00:25:37

So, brother, I have an admission to make because our house is about 100 meters outside the boundary. And, you know, normally on occasion, the monastics or some monastics will come and visit us for, you know, nice cappuccino or latte or pancakes or whatever. And so I was thinking that given we’re just outside the boundary, that when the wind is blowing the particular way, I will make lots of fresh coffee and the smell of it will float across the boundary. And I can see if I can sort of get some of the monastics to sort of cross the line.

00:26:19

Sure. And I’ll have binoculars and I’ll just be looking through to see which brown robes and bald heads are crawling to your house.

00:26:27

Or we could, or I could photograph them and then send you the photos. We could do… It’s like in Buddhism, there’s this whole concept of manas, isn’t it? Which is a bit like the egos, it’s like the part of us that is the sort of part of us that will do bad things.

00:26:43

Right.

00:26:43

So maybe I could entice the monastics to see who crosses the line and then…

00:26:48

You can test them.

00:26:49

Yeah, test them in a hundred different ways and then send the photos to you. But let’s not discuss it on the podcast.

00:26:57

No, no.

00:26:58

We don’t want people to know about it. Brother, aspirations. So maybe we should share our aspirations. So why don’t you go first. So you talked in your letter about the need to slow down. What is that all about for you?

00:27:26

I see for myself that I have started to bypass a lot of the basic practice because I feel like I’ve been a monk for 20 years now and the abbot of the community. I have, quote unquote, important things to take care of. And the community loves me so much and I’m so blessed that I really feel this love and this respect and I am also so in love with the community. And a lot of the times I feel like… There are sometimes I’m doing things and I could do much more mindfully, but nobody says it because people are like, ‘oh, he’s so busy’. And within the last three years, like almost every interaction I’ve had with, like, my monastic siblings or even laypeople like friends that come along, the first question they would always ask me is like, ‘brother, are you busy?’ Or they would share their concerns like, ‘oh, I don’t want to bother you because I know you have so much to do’. And I started to have this, I start to recognize this reputation I had, which is like I’m so busy. And I I ask myself, am I that busy? And am I really giving up this energy that I’m not present enough for people? I’m always present for meetings, I’m always present for tasks, I’m always present when it’s a road that I need to offer, I feel that. But then am I not present for just being, just being a monk, just being a brother, being a friend? So one day in Upper Hamlet I was just walking from my office to my room, which I don’t know how far that is, but this is a good distance. And the spirit in our monasteries, whatever we walk, whenever we walk, we walk in the spirit of walking meditation. Walk just to walk and do it with ease. And I started to recognize I didn’t enjoy walking as much. I am always trying to get to the destination in order to rest or in order to do or in order to practice. So I started to see this habit or this voice inside of me is just saying, just do, there’s things for you to do. Today you’re going to do this, you’re going to do that. And I just started to realize I’m becoming a victim of my own ambition, in a way, and I’m also allowing myself to not enjoy the present moment, and that’s when I was like… Especially because we had this podcast with one of our sisters and just listening to her share about her practice and her way of being just so inspired me to slow down. And that’s when I realized, like, I need to slow down so that I don’t lose my aspiration because my deepest aspiration is to live out my life as a true continuation of the Buddha and of our teacher Thay, as well as to be a real monk.

00:31:09

And in your letter that you read out, you talked about asking the community of monks and nuns to support you, because I think that’s really fascinating, because it’s sometimes so difficult. We can have an aspiration on our own, but it’s sometimes very… It’s like a New Year’s resolution in a sense. It’s like we can come up with something, but if we’re on our own, it actually can be very hard to keep to it. But you’ve very specifically said, I need the support of you, my community. Tell me a bit about how that works in your mind.

00:31:46

For me, when I can vocalize it, it also has a very big impact on my actions. Like, yeah, we all can just make aspirations and keep it internally and then we don’t do it, OK, next year. Because no one knows. But the moment when you have the courage to speak it up, to share about it and to voice it, it also has your seal in it. And then, in our tradition, which is taking refuge in each other, there’s a part where we also want to allow others to help us and for myself, especially as an elder brother for many in the community, sometimes if you don’t ask, then the young ones will say, ‘oh, you know, he’s solid enough, he can take care of it, he can handle it’. But sometimes, no, we need that support because we are also vulnerable at some stages or sometimes we even lose ourselves in our habits, in our energies of frustration and whatnot. So for me to say ‘please, help’ is also just to open that door to allow people. And I honestly don’t know what kind of support I will get, but I believe because I have shared those words, let’s say if somebody sees me rushing back because I have said, please support me, somebody might just say, brother, slow down. And that would change. That will help me change my way of walking in that very moment.

00:33:24

And for those who may not listen to every episode, you were also the attendant, personal attendant to Thich Nhat Hanh for 17 years. Did Thay need help from the sangha for his practice?

00:33:37

Of course, Thay always took refuge in the sangha. In the past, at the beginning of the Rains Retreat, Thay would also share that he is taking refuge in the community so that he can continue to nourish his own practice as well as his own way of serving because he knows he cannot do it alone. He needs the community to support him. And I believe that’s where he had the most strength that was offered to him, was by being with the community.

00:34:16

All right. And brother, I mean, some people might be listening and saying, well, you know, Brother Phap Huu, you’ve been in the practice 20 years, and you’re telling us you have to be reminded of the basic practices. And they might say, well, you know, what’s all this Buddhism about? You know, is it not working? And one of the things in my experience is that, you know, we’re so habituated in our monkey mind that actually we always have to be reminded of this. This is not a destination where one day in next year you will be fully realized and you will never again have to be reminded of the practice. And I remember asking Sister Jina many years ago, who’s one of Thay’s longest serving Western monastics. I said, Sister Jina, don’t you get bored with Thich Nhat Hanh repeating the same sort of advice or teachings every time? I mean, you’ve heard it probably thousands of times. You know, do you get bored? Doesn’t he get bored? And she said, ‘Are you practicing?’ In other words, you know, we can be told things a thousand times, but actually are we truly practicing? And also we constantly have to be reminded because we’re like an elastic band, if you sort of stretch it, the tension of it wants to pull back to its original form, which is for our minds to go in a thousand directions. So tell us a little bit about that sense of, you know, after 20 years, you’re still there to remind yourself is that failure, is a success? Is it just the way life is?

00:35:54

That’s being a human. No, we are always changing. And because we’re also always adapting, so we also need to strengthen our own practice. And I just look at the Buddha himself and I ask myself, after enlightenment, why didn’t the Buddha just stop? But through the stories and through the history and through the sutras that we read, we see that even the Buddha, through his time after enlightenment, he continue to keep his practice alive because the practice is a living, is a living energy that you have to maintain. It’s a… we speak a lot about mindfulness, right? And we say mindfulness is in each and every one of us. And it depends how we nourish that energy of mindfulness for us to have it available or not.

00:37:00

And neuroscience shows us that if we don’t… if you don’t use it, you lose it.

00:37:05

Exactly.

00:37:05

So actually, the science is also showing that actually it’s not like you learn it once and then job done. We have to constantly remind ourselves, work with it, practice it, build it. And also, I’m wondering, brother, whether for you the practice changes.

00:37:21

It does. So one thing I always tell my younger brothers when I have a chance to mentor them is don’t take this basic practice for granted because I’ve listened… I’ve had the chance to listen to, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of dharma talks by Thay. And I also don’t get bored because when it comes down to the theory, I think I can share about it. But then when it comes to the practice, this is where I see the difference. So on the first day of my arrival in Plum Village, I hated sitting meditation. It was painful. It was dreadful. It was suffering, like just learning to sit still and do nothing? Wow, that was crazy. That’s a crazy idea. But now, having that chance to sit and do nothing, that is such a gift. And knowing to enjoy silence, knowing to enjoy the breathing, connecting to the breath, seeing your mind, what is manifesting and in how to guide the mind. Before, when I just started, I needed a lot of mental reminders internally. I would even say, ‘oh, I recognize stiffness in my back, I need to relax, I recognize my thought running to the past, running to the future, I see myself being carried away by this quote unquote perception’. And just identifying, and you have to put a lot of energy and emphasis in recognizing it because you’re not used to it. But now I can just sit there. And when a thought comes up, instead of putting so much energy, I can say my mindfulness kicks in and says, ‘ah, you are starting to go in this direction, refocus, reguide it’. And your ease into practice starts to manifest also.

00:39:32

And there’s also something, brother, about stopping is having to face ourselves. So I see a lot of young people who… There’s a moment something’s not happening, they see it as boredom and immediately looking to fill that time. But actually, when we stop is the only time we’re able to face ourselves. And it’s funny because we, my wife and I, moved here about 15 months ago now, and we were asking ourselves after a year, you know, are we truly happy here? And, you know, and in some ways we have all the conditions. We have a nice home. We’re next to the community we love. We’ve been able to practice through the pandemic with the monastics, et cetera, et cetera. But there was something in both, in the back of our minds that wasn’t fully happy. And I was sort of ruminating on this. And then one morning I sort of got it. So the reason we’re not happy is because, you know, we’ve moved from New York, central New York, busy job, busy life, full of exciting baubles and exciting life. And my wife’s an artist and exhibiting and all those sort of things. And suddenly we’ve had to stop. We’re in the middle of nowhere in a house with a small village, sort of 10 minutes drive away. And stuck, quote unquote, in this house. And so the reason I was not feeling completely happy was actually not because I wasn’t completely happy, but I was creating the conditions to feel where I wasn’t completely happy and actually have to face more of myself.

00:41:10

And Jo, what is your aspiration for these three months?

00:41:14

Well, brother, so I was sitting in the opening ceremony and I suddenly thought, ‘oh, I forgot to think about my aspiration’. So actually, it came to me there and then in a very sort of powerful visualization. And the best way to explain it, let me have a go. So when I was young, sort of young, early teenager, young child, early teens, I sort of had no sense of why I was alive. I really felt that I couldn’t work out. I felt I was worthless, that I had nothing to offer, that life was really confusing to me and I couldn’t really make sense of anything. And my experience of that was I felt I was sitting at the edge of an ocean of sadness. And I felt all that sadness was mine. I felt I was sitting at the edge of my ocean of sadness and and it was mine alone. And then sort of later in life, you know, this must be about 25 years ago, I was seeing a therapist stroke coach, and I went on this sort of.. He took me on this guided visualization, which he didn’t… he just created a space in which I went on a journey. And I remember I was at the edge of the abyss and I was clinging to the edge. I didn’t want to fall because for me the abyss was my annihilation. And he suggested I just let go. And I let go and I fell and fell and fell and expecting to sort of hit the ground and just splatter. And that was the end of me. And instead I sort of landed on my feet in this sort of underground sort of walkway. And I followed this walkway and it opened up into a cavern. And to my left there was a pool of water completely still. And on the other side of the pool was a little bassinet with a baby in it. And I walked to the bassinet and lifted up the child and realized that the child was myself. And I recognize in that moment the child represented my innocence. And that I held the child close to me and all of a sudden a sort of the darkness almost, just almost, I was transported up to the surface of the earth again. And it was this sort of bucolic, sort of beautiful spring day with children running around and butterflies and birds singing. And it was like a great healing moment. And then in the opening ceremony, I experienced myself back in that place, in that underground cavern, because what I’ve been feeling while I’ve been in Plum Village is a sense.. this wish to go deeper. And I haven’t known what that means. I keep on saying I need to go deeper. What should I do? But nothing has really sort of resonated with me. And I sort of just had that as an open question to myself. What is it? What does it mean to go deeper? And part of that is because, you know, I’m sure a lot of the monastics feel like that. When you meet people and want to support them, often what you learn through the practice comes across as wisdom. And so you support someone and they say, oh, my God, that’s amazing. Thank you so much. You know, that’s such great of wisdom. I really contemplate on that. And in a sense, it’s very easy to mistake, mistake it is me being at my edge. Oh, look how wise I am, I’m supporting that person. But also realizing that actually the truth is that I’m in my comfort zone. That to me, while a person who’s never come across this work may think, oh, wow, but to me, I’m just sharing what I already know and it’s easy to get stuck in that place. And so as I was sitting in the meditation hall, I thought what is it to go deeper? And as I said, I felt myself back in that same place, in that underground cavern and I saw there was a hole going down with the sort of rungs, metal rungs, almost like sort of going down from the street into a sewer. And so I started climbing down the rungs of the ladder and went down and then found myself sort of waist deep in a black river. And I actually river is a generous term, it was a… It was maybe a stream or a brook, but it was quite, quite strong water, but not a huge river. But it was there. And I followed it and it came out to an ocean, and I sat on the beach and I realized it was the ocean of sadness, but it wasn’t my sadness. It was everyone’s sadness. And for me, it was realizing as I sat on the beach and I was listening to all the cries for help that actually I could be there for the people who were crying for help and I could sit there on the beach and it wasn’t that I was uncaring because I felt the pain. But I didn’t feel I was being dragged into the ocean. And it was a sort of realization of my journey that that over many, many years I’ve helped to sort of transform my own ocean of sadness. And I also mistook it as all mine, whereas actually I think that ocean of sadness as a collective ocean. And so I suppose my aspiration, what is my aspiration? My aspiration is to go deeper into my own transformation in order to be there for other people. You know, it’s very hard. There was… There’s a film called The Green Mile, and it’s starring Tom Hanks. And it’s got this character who’s on death row. He’s falsely accused of killing two girls. And at some point, I can’t remember exactly, he said, you know, he’s about to be executed and the prison wardens want to save him. And he says, I don’t want to be saved because it feels like they’re shards of glass going into my head. It feels like, you know, I feel all the pain in the world. And I realize sort of as a child, I sort of mistook the collective pain for my pain. And so it’s about how do I feel all that pain but not be consumed by it and be able to go into, you know, what some people might say is hell and just be there for people. And in that sense, I think it’s very much like Plum Village, you know, is sometimes you don’t have to do a lot. You just have to be there. And Plum Village as a community, as a light in the world, isn’t always about you doing something particular. It’s about you holding an energy that is important in the world.

00:48:40

Yes, and we have to also nourish our joy and nourish our well-being and in order to be present and that’s also… This is a wonderful opportunity for you too Jo to also rest and heal and also allow yourself to just be and not always give, because that is also a habit. And if we’re unmindful, we can also be be dragged under the impression that we always have to give. Because there’s also a hook, which is the praise as well as the the gratitude, and that can also make ourself being lost. And that’s why I also added that line for myself, because I want to slow down and to learn to be and learn to be myself and go deeper, because I don’t want to lose myself, because projects are beautiful projects and giving is such a reward in it, but I, I speak for myself, which is like sometimes I do see there is a hook which is like, oh, you know, you start to see people giving you respect and giving you all of these admiration. And that in itself can also make you lose yourself.

00:50:07

Yeah. And can I say, you know, there’s that phrase that the most troubled children are the children of therapists because… And the phrase is almost based on the idea, the idea that, you know, if we constantly focus on helping others, it’s often just as much an avoidance of dealing with our own problems because we think, oh, well, we’re helping this person to deal with their problem and we’re helping that person. And therefore, I must be OK. Rather than actually recognizing that actually it’s a collective energy, which is if it’s your problem and I’m sitting here with you hearing your problem, then at some level that is also my problem. And I think that that resonates with, you know, the Buddhist teachings on store consciousness that each of us are all the seeds of joy, happiness, anger, resentment, jealousy. And actually so when we when we want to support someone else, actually hearing their story is also, by its nature, going to touch something in ourselves.